Lorenzo García Vega

Cult author and creator of one of the most unclassifiable works in Cuban literature, his influence reaches the youngest writers of the Island.

Cuban writer Lorenzo García Vega died at Metropolitan Hospital in Miami. He was 85 years old and had recently suffered a gallbladder attack that was complicated by a serious heart condition.

García Vega was born in Jagüey Grande. He came to Havana as a teenager and became associated with the Orígenes Group. In 1945 he completed his Baccalaureate at the Instituto de La Habana. With Espirales del Cuje he won the National Literature Prize from MINED in 1952. In 1954 he graduated as a Doctor of Law from the University of Havana and in 1961 he obtained his doctorate in Philosophy and Letters.

He was responsible for publications at the Cuban National Commission of UNESCO and Deputy Director of the Literary Research Center of the National Council of Culture. He worked at the Cuban Institute of the Book and collaborated in the preparation of the Dictionary of Cuban Literature. In 1968 he settled in New York and later in Miami, United States, a country he had previously visited.

Like the other Origenistas, he categorizes the poetic universe with the image. Intuitive-verbal associations he expressed as oneiric succession, which characterizes his poetry with a sense of "distance," a derivative of a poetics of memory, as the principal distinction of this "second generation."

Belonging to the group centered around José Lezama Lima and the Orígenes magazine, he was the youngest of the group and the one who published the most texts throughout the existence of the publication. What is perhaps his best-known book, Los años de Orígenes (Monte Ávila, Caracas, 1979; reissued by Bajo la Luna, Buenos Aires, 2007), constitutes a memoir and a settling of accounts, not only with the writers who made up this group, but with the republican era, with the early years of the revolutionary period, with the nineteenth century and with the national imagination.

"One day," Octavio Paz wrote to him, "your book will be read for what it is: one of the most lucid testimonies of these infamous years."

Author of one of the most unclassifiable works in Cuban literature, he published poems, stories, essays, diaries, memoirs, accounts of dreams, sketches of novels: Suite para la espera (Orígenes, Havana, 1948), Espirales del cuje (Orígenes, Havana, 1952, National Literature Prize), Cetrería del títere (Central University of Las Villas, 1960), Ritmos acribillados (New York, 1972), Rostros del reverso (Monte Ávila, Caracas, 1974), Collages de un notario (La Torre de Papel, Miami, 1992), Espacios para lo huyuyo (La Torre de Papel, Miami, 1993), Vilis (Deleatur, Angers, 1998), Poemas para penúltima vez (1948-1989) (Saeta, Santo Domingo, 1991), Vilis (1998), Variaciones a como veredicto para sol de otras dudas (La Torre de Papel, Miami, 1993), Palíndromo en otra cerradura. Homenaje a Duchamp (Pequeña Venecia, Caracas, 1999), El oficio de perder (Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2005; Espuela de Plata, Seville, 2005), Papeles sin ángel (2005), Cuerdas para Aleister (Tsé-Tsé, Buenos Aires, 2005), Devastación del Hotel San Luis (Mansalva, Buenos Aires, 2007), Son gotas del autismo visual (Mata-Mata, Guatemala City, 2010), Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto (La Palma, Madrid, 2011).

In his books, García Vega cultivated collage, the fragmentary, digressions, the interrupted. He made labyrinths and kaleidoscopes emblems of his work. No mueras sin laberinto, was the title given to an anthology of his work published in Buenos Aires (Bajo la Luna, 2005). In his books certain childhood memories from Jagüey Grande recur, silent cinema, psychoanalysis, esotericism, the boxes constructed by American artist Joseph Cornell, a mattress thrown in a barren lot...

The infidelity he showed toward literary genres, his disregard for the conventions that each genre demands, are compensated in his books by powerfully woven discourse, an obsessive voice, obsessed with achieving some form, with giving form to his thoughts and suspicions and perplexities and oneiric visions.

Exiled since 1967, first in Madrid, New York, Caracas, and finally in Miami, he called this last destination Playa Albina in his books. Vilis, the title of one of his books, was, according to him, the astral body of Playa Albina or Miami. And, in the same way he liked to baptize places, he liked to baptize himself as the non-writer, the notary of Orígenes, the maker of little boxes, the collage artist.

Lorenzo García Vega wrote abundantly until the end. He gained increasingly more editions and amazed readers: his fame is that of a cult author. Censored in the dictionary of Cuban literature published by the Institute of Literature and Linguistics of Cuba, the official digital encyclopedia Ecured characterizes his literature thus: "what was beginning to be revealed is today an rarefied, strange writing, mocking of clumsy categorizations." Contrary to these official administrations, his work began to be appreciated and revalued in Havana by the generation of Cuban poets born in the 1960s, and his influence today reaches the youngest writers of the Island.

Jorge Luis Arcos is preparing a volume that studies his work meticulously and which will be published at the end of this year by the Madrid publisher Colibrí. Rafael Rojas has included Lorenzo García Vega among the Cuban avant-garde writers to whom he has dedicated a forthcoming book.

He has also published:
Espirales del Cuje (1952), for which he was awarded the National Literature Prize in that same year.
Ritmos acribillados (1972)
Collages de un notario (1992), Espacios para lo huyuyo (1993)
Poemas para penúltima vez (1948-1989) (1991) Vilis (1998)
No mueras sin laberinto (first anthology of his work published in Argentina, 2005)
Cuerdas para Aleister (2005)
Devastación del Hotel San Luis (2007).